Self bought this book for The Man last year, but ended up reading it herself. It’s made up of a lot of little remembrances, interviews with various former members of the armed forces, some of whom enlisted for reasons ranging from “I was kicked out of school and didn’t know what to do with myself” to “I was the fourth generation to serve in the United States Army.”

Here’s a memoir from Rod Hirsch, who served in the Army during the Vietnam War:

I heard the strains of Reveille. I was very dismayed to find out that it was recorded. I had always thought there was some guy standing out in front of the barracks, blowing Reveille on a bugle. And that made me very disappointed.

You’re eighteen years old, you just got out of high school, and you go into a situation where you’re going to be disciplined heavily. There’s going to be a lot expected of you, and this is something that most of us had not experienced. And so we’re all confused, we all feel stupid, we all feel like we have left feet, we don’t do anything right. It’s a traumatic experience.

Whoo! What a lot of posts self has written on just one day! She’s enjoyed herself thoroughly.

So intense this year has been. Self is just now picking up the threads of the various novels/novellas she began to read as long as a year ago.

Here’s an excerpt from Kyi May Kaung’s novella Black Rice.

She was a storyteller too, my mother, just like Uncle Kong and Aunt Anouk. So I always knew that after her tenth failure at the Dufferin Hospital, she was so sad, she turned her face towards the wall, wishing she were dead, tears streaming from her eyes. Even the jokes of my inebriated father, already tipsy at the afternoon visiting hour, could not make her smile. Her tenth pregnancy had not ended in a miscarriage but in a live birth. To keep the pregnancy, she lay in bed almost all the eight months, hardly moving. On the advice of her doctor, she gave up sex with her husband. She was so proud of carrying to term and of having a live birth. And it was a boy, too, she told me. She said his eyes and nose, and ears that stuck out, were just like mine. Just like my father’s ears.

Kyi “has been writing fiction since she was a teenager in Rangoon, Burma, and her play Shaman was praised by Edward Albee. She has won a Fulbright fellowship, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Award, the William Carlos Williams Award of the Academy of American Poets, and was a Pew Finalist in Fiction twice. K. M. Kaung’s fiction has appeared in the Wild River Review, the Northern Virginia Review, the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine, and in Himal Southasia.”

Self stumbled across this book in April, after attending an Arbus exhibit at the Fraenkel Art Gallery, in downtown San Francisco.

In the summer of 1929, just before the stock market crash, Arbus’s family moved into 1185 Park Avenue.

This is from a radio interview conducted by Studs Terkel in 1968, for his book Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression.

The family fortune always seemed to me humiliating. When I had to go into that store . . . I would come on somebody’s arm or holding somebody’s hand at what must have been a fairly young age and it was like being a princess in some loathsome movie of some kind of Transylvanian obscure middle European country and the kingdom was so humiliating.

Here’s self’s first take. She was in Cambridge, England visiting a friend when she happened to catch sight of crews practicing on the river behind a local restaurant called Plough:

An All-Woman Crew: Cambridge, England, May 2014

And yet more crews! Self found it extremely difficult to photograph these subjects, because they moved so amazingly fast. Well, yeah, suppose that is the point. They’re practicing for a race, for crying out loud. But, in addition, self was so anxious that she kept dropping her camera. Ugh.

And finally, a shot of a solitary woman crewing:

So, here is a list of all the “betweens” self thinks she succeeded in capturing in the above photographs:

Between the banks of a river

Between the oars of a boat

Members of the crew assume positions in a boat, seated in front or behind or between other crew members.

The week before self left for the UK, she attended a reading in Keplers in Menlo Park, featuring contributors to Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian American Writers, which was edited by Anita Amirrezvani and Persis Karim.

Self finally got around to starting it today. The Introductions quotes various contributors’ views on their Iranian heritage. Here are three:

Sholeh Wolpé: “I knew I was suffocating. I do and did understand the sudden madness that takes hold of young girls in societies where women, grossly oppressed, pour kerosene on themselves and strike a match. It is the madness of desperation. If all doors are shut in your face, if you have not even a single unbarred window to look out from, then death seems like the only salvation . . . ”

Mehdi Tavana writes “about Iranians not only because I am one, but because our history is an epic tragedy, and I am attracted by sweeping narratives. Iran’s story is one of espionage, loss, betrayal, religious celebration, glorious celebration, bloody revolution, and tragic love that ‘dares not speak its name.’ Because I was raised in this country, I have the audacity to write stories and send them into the world and expect that people will read them. It is self-indulgent and it is bold. But what can I say?”

Shideh Etaat: “I spent most of my childhood embarrassed about my culture, and now as a writer I spend most of my energy trying to understand it.”